At Forums, New York State Education Commissioner Faces a Barrage of Complaints

The audience protested Common Core testing at a forum in Ward Melville High School in East Setauket, N.Y.Credit
Barton Silverman/The New York Times

He has been shushed, booed, called imperious and mocked as the incomprehensible teacher who bleated on and on in Charlie Brown’s classroom.

In a series of public forums across the state, John B. King Jr., the state education commissioner, has become the sounding board for crowds of parents, educators and others who equate his name with all they consider to be broken in schooling today. Some blame him for too quickly imposing more rigorous academic standards tied to what is known as the Common Core. Parents call him deaf to the misery of pupils taking standardized tests and too open to commercial involvement in the system; teachers blame him for sapping what joy they had left in their craft.

“There is now a ‘Common Core Syndrome,' ” Beth Dimino, an eighth-grade science teacher, said on Tuesday, speaking to Dr. King in a packed high school auditorium in Suffolk County.

“Do you understand what that means?” she continued. “We have children that are being diagnosed by psychologists with a syndrome directly related to work that they do in the classroom. If that is not child abuse, I don’t know what is.”

While no such condition is listed in the official manual of psychiatric disorders — Ms. Dimino said afterward she had read about it in online psychologists’ forums — her anger was typical for the night, as speaker after speaker took aim at Dr. King.

Onstage, Dr. King’s body language — one hand cupping his chin, the other lying gently on a table with a pen between his fingers — oozed calm. And when he was given a chance to speak, he reiterated the state’s commitment to its current course.

“The reason that 45 states, the District of Columbia and Department of Defense schools have all come together around the Common Core is the clear need to ensure that all of our students graduate from high school ready for college and career success,” he said.

He was then drowned out by boos.

Dr. King is holding the listening tour as several major changes occur all at once, in a way that has redefined the classroom experience virtually overnight. Schools have begun to adopt tougher curriculums in accordance with the Common Core. New tests based on those standards began last year, before the curriculums were fully in place, causing students who once easily passed tests to suddenly be branded as failing.

Meanwhile, a new teacher evaluation system has led districts to add even more bubble tests, even in the early grades. And the state has angered some parents with plans to share students’ academic data on an Internet cloud to help education companies develop digital teaching materials more closely tailored to children’s needs.

Dr. King plans to host six more forums outside New York City through Dec. 9, and at least five in the city in the coming weeks.

Photo

John B. King Jr., the state education commissioner, at a forum last week at Ward Melville High School in East Setauket, N.Y.Credit
Barton Silverman/The New York Times

“Experiencing the frustrations and emotions of the change process is part of leadership,” Dr. King said in an interview last week. “So, I see this as part of my responsibility to both hear people out about their concerns, to make thoughtful adjustments where appropriate, and also that we continue to explain why we are so convinced about the urgency and importance of raising standards.”

If Dr. King, 38, seems professorial to the extreme, it could be his background: He has an undergraduate degree from Harvard, a law degree from Yale and a doctorate in education from Columbia. His father was the first African-American principal in Brooklyn, his mother a guidance counselor born in Puerto Rico. He was orphaned at age 12, after both parents succumbed to illness — hardships that he credits public-school teachers with helping him get through.

After three years of teaching, he was a founder of Roxbury Preparatory, a celebrated charter school in Massachusetts. Then he helped start Uncommon Schools, a network of charters based in New York, before joining the State Education Department in 2009 as a deputy commissioner. He was named commissioner in 2011.

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His restraint has not succeeded in calming the crowds that have come to see him. At a forum near Poughkeepsie last month, the criticism grew so visceral — there were derogatory names and obscene gestures — that he canceled several forthcoming hearings, then rolled out a new schedule and format. Instead of sitting onstage alone or nearly alone, he now sits at a dais surrounded by others, including state or local officials, as a way to spread some of the vitriol around and make the state’s case appear to be coming from more than one man. But he is still the main aim; as he spoke on Long Island last week, one woman mimicked the Charlie Brown teacher.

“John is doing a yeoman’s job, staying cool, focusing on the policy issues,” said Merryl H. Tisch, the chancellor of the State Board of Regents, who has served as one of Dr. King’s psychological bodyguards at the forums. “People are asking complicated questions, but I haven’t seen him miss a beat.”

Some of Dr. King’s supporters blame teachers’ unions for whipping up some of the emotion. Timothy Daly, the president of the New Teacher Project, a group focused on teacher effectiveness and aligned with the reform movement, said that public displays of aggression toward Dr. King were political tactics that should be cause for concern.

“This is the first African-American leader of the State Education Department,” he said. “And to watch him be shouted at and insulted by largely white audiences in the suburbs is discomforting and it is jarring that, not only has it happened, but it has happened repeatedly.”

Dr. King said it was impossible to know what forces drive an individual’s behavior or tone, but he does not believe race was driving the debate on state education policy. And Richard C. Iannuzzi, president of the New York State United Teachers, said it was wrong to characterize the union as driving the opposition to reform. But he did fault Dr. King for not making bigger adjustments to alleviate some of the classroom disruptions.

“I hold the commissioner less accountable for implementations not working than I hold him accountable for failing to accept that fact and making the significant course corrections that could right this ship,” Mr. Iannuzzi said. “That is the greater failure in my mind.”

Dr. King said in an interview that interrupting the changes now would not make sense, and noted that the state signed on to the Common Core three years ago. Many of the tests that teachers and parents are complaining about are mandated by federal law, he said, and some, like Regents exams, have been in place for more than a century. But he said that the forums were contributing to some rethinking in his office. Most significantly, the state is looking for ways to eliminate some testing.

“I think the debate about whether we need higher standards is a settled debate,” Dr. King said. “It is really a question of how do we continue to support people through the implementation.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 18, 2013, on Page A22 of the New York edition with the headline: At Forums, State Education Commissioner Faces a Barrage of Complaints. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe